19 juni, 2011

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T.H.E Newport Beach, Los Angeles

I have returned from Los Angeles and the 2011 T.H.E show in Newport Beach and also survived the less amusing return trip to Stockholm. Jetlag, I found after years of feigning pills of all kinds, was made nonexistent by small dose of Melatonin before bedtime upon return.

Sitting in my retreat cottage in Lapland, overlooking a mirror calm lake with occasional arctic char or trout fetching an insect in mid air, I feel the mood is the right for some philosophical contemplation on recent events with Earo.

We are continuing along the path to make the launch in the US and our partner in this vast country, Atenga Inc. with its subsidiary Earo-US are doing a great job not only in establishing a presence but also standing solid in their conviction to take on the cumbersome work to create brand awareness from scratch.

T.H.E in Las Vegas was by no standards poor for Earo, on the contrary, but the Los Angeles event was so much more, greater number of exhibitors and more real endusers as visitors.

The venue, The Hilton, proved to have rooms with less acoustic issues than what is usual, only a slight bottom end boom at the preferred listening position did not mask the characteristics that we wished to convey. The setup was as before, files played from Apple laptop running Itunes to an audiophile DAC whose balanced audio was fed straight to the two pairs of Earo Eight and TheUlf respectively. The W4S DAC features a remote volume control exactly where you want it in the chain. We got several comments on how simple it was to get high-end sound and a great many visitors where clear about the diverging trends, one part of the industry will retain a motive force with passionately engineered and presented devices for the buyer to experiment with. The other path, the short one to high end and high definition music experience, is the one that will be entirely digital and “filebased” all the way to the last mile, the transducer. Or, loudspeaker as we prefer calling it.

Our three days of public reception were just wonderful. Per and myself did not have our wifes with us this time why we had less opportunity to leave the room to rummage the venue, we were busy playing music and discussing most of the time available. We tried to play as varied music as possible and to respect the visitors need to manage time so it was a medley of Classic, Jazz, Blues plus some softer Rock. All mixed to present as much of the characteristics by throwing as many difficult passages as we could at the speakers. We did miss out on having heavier Rock as we did get some requests for this. I hurried downstairs and searched the audiophile record sales but it appears good recorded Rock is difficult to find…At the end of the day, female vocals do very quickly reveal what it is all about and we played a lot of this. Here it´s important to present a medley so that a particular recordings tonality is not perceived to be the one of the speakers.

The feedback did not wait long. Regardless of how confident one may be as designer, no one can deny the importance of listener feedback and we got it, tons of it in fact and it was very, very good. One visitor sat for a long time , then held up his arm with hairs standing to attention “this is how good it sounds”. Others just stayed on and the demo slid into musical enjoyment rather than speaker demo, that’s another sign that you got it right. Another visitor, after playing both tunes with loud and high pitches said “you sit there and wait for the moment it limits or breaks up but it never happens”

One distributor that spoke with my colleague said “there are five speaker brands on the show that are of interest and yours is one of them”. Being in some pretty amazing company, this hit home well.

A couple of gentlemen came in and began asking some questions revealing their particular knowledge in the field of horns. One of them said “we know how difficult it is to make this type of design work and most fail but this is proof of what success is. I have never heard anything so good”

Summing it up, the overall and lingering emotion is that of great enjoyment meeting all these fantastic individuals and to listen to their music (we are open to BYO always) and share the passion for the art. Profound thanks to you for making this such a great event.